Kineko(FDS) FAQ/Walkthrough version 1.0.0 by schultw.andrez@sbcglobal.net(anitspam spoonerism) Please do not reproduce for profit without my consent. You won't be getting much profit anyway, but that's not the point. This took time and effort, and I just wanted to save a memory of an old game and the odd solutions any way I could. Please send me an email referring to me and this guide by name if you'd like to post it on your site. ================================ 1. INTRODUCTION 2. CONTROLS 3. STRATEGIES AND PICTURES 4. CHEATS 5. VERSIONS 6. CREDITS ================================ 1. INTRODUCTION Kineko is an innovative little puzzler where you have a moving picture broken into rectangular tiles, and your job is to reconstruct it based on what you can see. You can rearrange the possible tiles however you want in the puzzle above, and you may need to flip them vertically or horizontally. While this seems outrageously taxing the first time you play it, you will soon learn that there is evidence you can rely on to test what should go where. The game has an hour in the "best time" list, and if your mind wanders or you get frustrated, it will be necessary. Still, if you keep your head and focus on one part of the puzzle at a time, you should do okay. The game also allows for if you oriented the puzzle incorrectly. 2. CONTROLS First, after you start the game on an emulator, you will need to switch sides. On fceuxd this is accomplished by hitting F8 F6 F8. You may need to wait a bit, and I would up doing so several times. Select is used to move through the menus, and A is used to choose an option. In the game proper, start pauses the game, and select and B are not used. You can move the hand around and push A to pick up and put down a piece. The pieces drop wherever your hand's finger points. You cannot place one piece on top of another. Touching the LR and/or UD arrows means you won't pick up a piece, but you will rotate it in the given direction(s). You can have both arrows going at once. You may also need to scroll the bottom left/right so that the pieces off the edges appear. It's probably best just to move to one edge, place a few pieces on that edge(4 in 4x4, 6 in 6x4 and 18 in 8x6) from one edge right away and move to the other so that you can see all the pieces at once. There's no penalty for being wrong at first. 3. STRATEGIES AND PICTURES If you really want a cheat sheet, you can screenshot the background and place it in MSPaint next to you. This is assuming you are using an emulator. Even that won't help if the background is standard, but it is a help. We'll start with the 16-picture versions of the puzzle. They are 4x4. If you want to avoid looking at the picture first, then you will give yourself some additional challenge, but if you look at the picture, you can tell roughly what goes in which row and what direction it should face. Then, when an object runs across that row, you can switch the order of the tiles if necessary. You should always leave one tile at the very bottom, and you should always start with the easiest row to pick off. That is usually the bottom one, and then you can move up. Don't try to solve the puzzle all at once. Use one pass to determine which pieces should fit on the bottom, then maybe use the next to determine what order they should be in, or which are oriented the wrong/right way. If you want to deviate from going bottom to top, then you may want to note which pieces are at the edge. You also want to make sure that you align everything the right way, if possible. If you have a good picture going left to right when it should go right to left, then you have to take every single row, flip each piece horizontally, open a square, and flip each piece opposite each other. This is not impossible, but it is arduous. You can again make one open square(near the center) and use that to flip everything. For 24/48 pieces you need to be even sharper about catching whatever floats from one square to the next, and for squares with plain backgrounds you may just need to get things in relative positions and move them later. Because 24 is 6x4 and 48 is 8x6 you may not have such clear connections between pieces. However, the basic principle is the same. Create a column or row depending on if the main movement is vertical or horizontal, then go ahead and fill other parts in. Picture 1: You have a blue lake on the bottom, white mountains in the distance, and a tall sailboat going right to left. The number 416 should be a tip-off that you have the pieces aligned right. If any piece goes left to right, then you can flip it, and the pieces with more sailboat are probably at the bottom. You also have a few neat tricks you can use to make the sea easier. The tiles are a blue and black checkerboard. While you can tell that the mostly-lake squares have the bottom of the boat on top, and it travels right to left, you may also note something is wrong if the checkerboards do not mesh. Picture 2: The plane flies back and forth, with a propellor at the front and clouds coming right to left. Make sure the 70 is facing the right way, and if you can catch the plane when it is only half visible on the bottom or top, then you can get things started quickly. If you want, take some time to flip squares so clouds go left. If the plane is in a part of your picture you have not placed yet, you can see which squares lose the plane last, and these can go on the right edge. For vertical orientation, note that a wheel is at the bottom and the lerson and the tail fin are at the top. Picture 3: This isn't too bad, because the raccoons walk right to left, the leader/mother thumps her chest, and the tots trail behind her. The bird is on the next row, and the bouncing moon is at the top. There may be some problem about where the moon starts/ends, but you can just see what are the first and last two tiles to have anything with the moon. It travels from left to right. Picture 4: Fish in an aquarium. This is very tricky, because tey keep moving their lanes. So you need to just place 15 pieces on the board and then see what can interlock. The fish in the middle goes in the opposite direction and is ahead of the other two--it will go off the screen first. There's no good way to tell what direction the fish should go in, so use the method above if your picture is continuous and does not give a complete solution. You cannot rely on things being the same, so you have to pay attention and see which squares get the tip of a fish, then which get the next bit, and so forth. You should actually be able to get a good chunk of the puzzle following the leading fish, which may or may not change columns, and you don't have to focus on the other ones right away. Picture 5: If you stargaze in real life I bet you can remember the positions of a lot of the stars. Unfortunately the colors twinkle in and out. The bottom is tougher without the green guys the UFO shoots and fires down to the bottom, but once they fall down, you can track when one moves off a square and to another. You'll want to note the formations at the edges so you have things aligned right. Even if you don't remember the positions of the stars, you should be able to track the green things as they fall to the bottom and then as they go back up. That can help you align squares vertically in their rows. And the top UFO should also help you clear the top. To get the sides right, just watch when little yellow things go across the screen to align things horizontally. The worst thing that can happen is that you guess the wrong direction they are in. Picture 6: Circles of water bursting out. Here all you can do is put things on the screen and, whenever a new circle starts, see which surrounding squares take up the ripples. You need to place them next to each other and wait for the next ripple to come through. Yes, this is hard, and I can't give any real descriptions except for when a picture gets a few pieces in relatively the right spot, you may have to move them over. This is definitely a one piece at a time puzzle although you have to have 15 of them in the puzzle proper to view and guess what goes together. Then when they are aligned, you may have to move them. Once everything is in its right place you may have to flip everything horizontally and/or vertically to get it into the orientation the computer wants. Picture 7: This maze is really cool. You have several guys muddling their way through it, and again, your objective is to place two squares together when you see a guy running between them. However, you may get the wrong orientations as well. This level is made much easier if you note that most pieces have walls around the edges, and the corners have no dead ends. They have a bend at the corner with nothing else around. If you get a corner in place, you can start tacking other squares onto it. And it is probably most efficient just to wait for the first corner you can identify and the first person that walks across it, and then you can start stapling in pieces as you need. You can also look carefully to see if someone going off a square disappears for good. That means it is an edge square. Picture 8: 3 jacks bounce across a uniform background--and each other. Rotation should not be a problem in this one because of the tip-off of the reflection--two black dots in the UR make it so that you know which way EACH piece needs to face. Then you can start moving them relatively and noting which one is in a corner or side(a bouncing jack vanishes) and working from there. Not having to worry about rotation lets you string pieces together very quickly, making this relatively easy despite the uniform background. Picture 9: Lines going at different speeds here. You will want to put all the squares in the box and then look for ones with lines going the same speed, and with lines going off the blocks at the same time. It should not be too hard to catch a couple in a row, but you may need to wait to collect an entire row or column. Then, once you have that row/column, you may need to flip it the other direction as well--this is done by seeing what a horizontal line can do. Maybe it is worthwhile writing what order a line comes through with the pieces as they are, so you can reorganize them or rotate them as necessary. Once you have one row/column in place, you can leverage that to complete other rows/columns. It's not too bad to follow a slow line and use that to determine what squares need to be where. Picture 10: Styrofoam peanuts fall in all different directions and are not easy to track. There's no way to figure out the rotations quickly, and all you can do is start pasting squares together until you find two that work. If you find a square with one peanut floating around, try to use your peripheral vision to see where it goes once it leaves the square. It's too hard to track several peanuts at a time. 4. CHEATS Don't read this if you don't want to force an easy puzzle solve, where the picture may well be messed up. However, it is possible that you can start yourself with a corner or something to make the puzzles more possible this way. If you want to solve the game, use this as a reference and set pieces in the right place and rotation accordingly. 0x442 = the start of the map for the main picture you are trying to make. It goes from the UL to the DR. Only 16 bytes are used for the 16, then 24 for the 24, and 48 for the 48, each denoting the next square's value. However, you should note that the pictures do not refresh when you change the values. You have to move each one individually for them to appear. 0xfe = no piece, 0x00 through 0x0f/0x17/0x2f = piece value. To put pieces in the right place in the map, start at 0x442 and type in 00 01 02 03 ... (last value) in the hex editor. But you have a bit more to do. 0x472 = pieces in the rows below. Values defined as above. The correct sequence of numbers to get the squares in position here is to change everything from 472 to 4a1 to FE after you've changed stuff above. If you forget to change a number above or below, there's a possibility you can have an incomplete puzzle or extra piece. 0x4a2 = rotations for each piece. However, this is not the rotation for the piece in position X. It is the rotation for piece number X. This doesn't make a difference if you've cheated the pieces in place. However, if you are just giving yourself a small boost, or fiddling around, here is what happens. 1) put piece 09 in the UL 2a) adjust byte 4a2, nothing happens to 09 2b) adjust byte 4a2+9=4ab, piece 09 is now rotated A piece rotated out of vertical position has the 2-bit turned on, and one rotated horizontally has the 1-bit turned on. So really all you have to do is turn everything to zero if you want to eliminate rotation from the equation for a puzzle. In order to solve the puzzle after doing all this cheating you may have to pick up and put down a square. 0x74 = tens seconds 0x75 = ones seconds 0x76 = tens minutes 0x77 = ones minutes 0x78 = tens hours 0x79 = ones hours End of FAQ Proper ================================ 5. VERSIONS 1.0.0: sent to GameFAQs 12/25/2007, complete 6. CREDITS Thanks to the usual GameFAQs gang, current and emeritus. They know who they are, and you should, too, because they get/got some SERIOUS writing done. Good people too--bloomer, falsehead, Sashanan, Masters, Retro, Snow Dragon/Brui5ed Ego, ZoopSoul, War Doc, Brian Sulpher, AdamL, odino, JDog and others I forgot. OK, even Hydrophant in his current not-yet-banned message board incarnation. I am not part of his gang, but I want him to be part of mine. Thanks to odino for suggesting this game to me. It was fun to play and analyze. Thanks to the NES completion project people for keeping it going strong enough that I could explore these side passages like the FDS and still know there was a project to go back to.